Study: Climate change lessons are rare at medical schools

A new survey has found that few medical schools incorporate climate change into their curricula.

Despite the threat climate change poses to human health, very few medical schools have made it a part of their coursework.

The International Federation of Medical Students’ Associations recently conducted a survey of medical schools in 118 countries. Of the medical schools reviewed, the IFMSA found 15.9% have made climate change a part of their curricula.

Dr. Renee Salas, an emergency room doctor and climate change researcher at the Harvard Global Health Institute, said she was not surprised by the results. Through her work at Harvard, she has tried to incorporate climate change into the teachings of U.S. medical schools.

Salas said the survey shows there is an opportunity to train the next generation of physicians so they have the skills necessary to practice in a future where global warming affects every aspect of their jobs.

“Climate change is truly that threat multiplier,” she said. “It impacts, in my opinion, every facet of how we practice medicine.”

The health impacts of climate change are numerous. More days with extreme heat could account for an increase of 1 million deaths each year in India alone (Climatewire, Nov. 1). Wildfires, which are also predicted to increase, pose a threat to people with respiratory conditions (Climatewire, Dec. 16). And the changing climate is exposing more people to vector-borne diseases such as Zika and Lyme (Climatewire, Oct. 30).

Sheri Weiser, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, said her own interest in climate change was spurred by research into food insecurity. The more she studied the subject, the more she found the issue was significantly exacerbated by climate change.

For example, an August study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found increased climate shocks could reduce gains that have been made in lowering the rates of stunting caused by poor childhood nutrition. The United Nations also issued a report that found the number of people suffering from hunger in 2018 reached an eight-year high due to economic, political and climate-related factors.

Weiser is now a leader in incorporating climate change into the university’s curriculum.

“One of the biggest barriers is competing priorities,” she said. “And how to add content without taking away content.”

Medical school curriculum by nature is always changing to include new research. An Association of American Medical Colleges survey of 147 medical schools in 2017-2018 found 34.7% were planning to make a curriculum change in the future. The survey found 30.6% of schools already had a curriculum change in the process.

There are natural fits in the curriculum to bring climate change into the conversation, according to Weiser. For example, the study of infectious disease presents an opportunity to discuss how more people could be affected.

Salas echoed that idea, saying that schools can add climate change to lessons of asthma and other conditions.

“My approach is all they need to do is add a climate lens to what they’re already teaching,” she said.

The big concern I have is that GP doctors are trained to unquestionably accept the results of other professionals for their medical diagnosis, and therefore they are at risk to be duped by other so called professionals, climate scientists. My Dr. is South African and she was mildly surprised that I was a skeptic since she just assumed the climate science must be correct because it is accepted as mainstream in science, media and political circles. The she mentioned the drought in South Africa, (this was a few years back) and I briefly explained that sure, especially South Africa is prone to drought due to its Mediterranean climate similar to California, (and has always suffered through periodic drought) but the biggest cause of the reservoir draw down was population growth and lack of new construction of water storage opportunities. Not to mention political turmoil and corruption. She just smiled and said very interesting. There must not be any doctors left in South Africa….

Modern doctors haven’t progressed far from the witch-doctors of the past. For decades they pushed ‘stress causes ulcers’ and still push ‘fat makes you fat’, the latter of which has resulted in an epidemic of diabetes and wrecked the lives of millions of people. And ‘cholesterol causes heart attacks’, resulting in pushing statins which are great for reducing cholesterol but appear to have no impact on heart attacks.

After all that nonsense, it’s no surprise that they might want to get into ‘climate change’.

That indescriminate drop in cholesterol caused by long term statin use is dangerous, because cholesterol is part of the body’s healing mechanism. High cholesterol is a symptom of, and response to, various health issues, and the statins could not only hide that but also retard the healing process.

For the benefit of anyone reading this and thinking I’m completely aganst statins, they do have their uses, just not as a long term cholesterol suppressant.

There must not be any doctors left in South Africa….
Well, there’ll be even less if the ANC government passes its National Health Insurance act. The current mixture of incompetent public health facilities and competent (but expensive) private facilities (paid for with after-tax income) is not acceptable to this socialist government. So, they are intending to make ALL health services through the Government, with total control over everything health related. Doctors will all be paid by the State (which has a reputation for late or non-payment). The current quote is: “If we don’t have the money for hospitals, doctors and drugs – how come we can apparently afford hospitals, doctors and drugs AND a huge civil service to run it all?”

Well, the Sydney Boxing Day cricket test was nearly postponed due to climate change global heating. Top, world class, international athletes can’t cope with a 35c day, in summer, in Australia and play a game thay have trained in?

I played intramural soccer in college, often in temps of 95°F+ at near 100% humidity. We sweated buckets and drank Gatorade in truly improbable amounts, but here I am.
Humans are tall, thin, have no fur and sweat all over. We are highly adapted to deal with warm temps. It’s cold that kills us most often.

Was there fog around? Near 100% is fog territory. I have noticed over the years that people **way** overestimate the humidity. Typically when the temperature is near 100 in the midwest the humidity is around 50% with a heat index of 118F. If the humidity were 70% the heat index would be 142F, and the hospitals would be swamped with people suffering from heatstroke and exhaustion. At 90% RH, where fog starts to form, the heat index would be 175F. A weather emergency would have been called long before that.

However, I do agree with you that humans are better suited for heat than any of the other animals. Because we are, in hot environments, a person in good shape can literally run any animal to the point of heat exhaustion. The saying ‘sweat like a hog’ is inaccurate, no animal sweats like us, that is one of the reasons that we can take the heat better than other animals.

Iain,
I too am taking my life in my hands and defying the Climate Gods by attending the Sydney Cricket Ground on Friday.
The Weather Bureau predicts windy and 22C to 28C as the temperature range.
God knows how we will survive.
Bring plenty of bronze zinc and 50+ sunscreen.
If Australia is on song, the New Zealand cricketers may not survive however!

Yes and the possible postponing had nothing to do with climate it was worry about the pitch condition because a State shield match had been stopped two weeks before because it was dangerous for batsman.

Now they did have to move the matches from the USUAL summer months to Nov. -Dec. … so … FIFA chooses one of the hottest spots on the earth for the World Cup … hmmmm? … must be because – global warming, that the matches will be held in the WINTER.

Fools. It is Summer in Australia. Melbourne often experiences temperatures in excess of 43 degrees centigrade. Check the historical record if you can find one that a purported scientist hasn’t “normalised” or as I prefer to say tampered with.

Climate change impacts how she communicates with, diagnoses, treats, and follows up with her patients.

“I know its unseasonably warm doc … maybe even hot, but I got hit and run over by a 240 lb bicyclist … I’ve got dirty oily asphalt in my bloody elbow, my index finger is broken and my thumb is dislocated. Can we try to focus a little bit here?”

As our colleague Steve Milloy, Junk Science, would say “where are the bodies”. Have any of you seen a Death Certificate that states COD “Climate Change”? How to you measure a force multiplier and add that to a Death Certificate?

“Your child, Madam, has a fair complexion, immune deficiency, fovea plana, grade 2 iris translucency, strabismus, and she tests positive for heterozygous, deleterious in trans mutations in an HPS gene. Before we can help her, though, please fill in this questionnaire on climate change policy goals. We suspect the syndrome is caused by d3nial running in the family.”

“Heart stopped, clearly. But before we start working on that, did you check how the polar bears are doing? We can’t go on reviving old white males if there’s a heatwave at the North Pole.”

“Exitus at 420ppm/v. The coroner should check for any signs of carbon footprint in lungs. I suspect foul play in here.”

Even if we had more hot days treat the effects of heat, not the cause of the heat. I really doubt that the American Red Cross needs to rewrite the text for the Advanced First Aid course by saying “this heat is due to climate change, therefore we treat heat exhaustion and dehydration differently …. ”

Renee Salas is just one more example of someone trying to make themselves relevant when they can’t find worthwhile topics to study

Life expectancy has been increasing, as the climate warmed in the past 325 years, especially when you exclude recent trends of young people dying from overdosing and/or shooting each other, which has nothing to do with climate change.

I’m not sure why, but the quality of this website has deteriorated in the past year, from publishing too many articles that climate alarmists would approve of, such as this one.

Real climate science has nothing to do with wild guess predictions like this article.

WUWT puts up the reports, often without added comment. It’s then up to the reader to make up their own mind. It is a very smart approach. Unlike most of the mainstream media, WUWT cannot reasonably be accused of telling only one side of the story or of twisting everything. Use it in WUWT’s defence if you ever get into a conversation with someone attacking WUWT unreasonably.

Jonas
I will say that WUWT publishes stupid articles by leftists to be fair.

I would prefer over 95% articles about real science.

Wild guess, always wrong, predictions of doom, are not real science, even if the authors are all science PhDs … and the predictions are so rarely right, that they are almost always a waste of time to read.

Would any leftists ever go to WUWT ?

Leftists are notoriously closed minded.

I’ve had leftists dismiss my climate science blog in three seconds, after merely glancing at the large chart on the home page (showing NASA-GISS global average temperatures since 1880):

Richard G: I would prefer science too, but this beast has moved a long way into politics so realistically WUWT has to go there too.

re your comments on leftists: You are absolutely right, but there is still a rationale for keeping up discussion with them. I do it so that third parties hear the arguments. But having said that, I have noticed that with the exception of just 2 or 3 wool-dyed friends, I am now having a lot more conversations with people who are questioning, not categorical, and are prepared to listen to the arguments.

So the major medical effect of a slightly warmer climate would be an increase in longevity, with the accompanying corollary of a higher percentage of elderly, and thus a need for a shift in emphasis to the treatment of those conditions a more mature patient must deal with.

PhD. I worked with a bunch of these guys. Illustrative case: A VP friend of mine showed me an analysis by a PhD of a proposal from an outside source. After a brilliant dissection of the proposal, showing its impossibility, thr PhD recommended putting the guy on a contract to work on the impossible suggestion. My friend asked me to comment. Chuckle.

Climate is a threat to human health because Obama said so. He said climate change causes asthma. He had his personal get out of jail free card so he could ignore the effects of his smoking on his daughter. It is not smoking that causes his daughter’s asthma. It’s climate change! He can just keep right on smoking.

Having read this post, I don’t know whether to laugh or vomit…. The depths these ‘climate change’ psychotics will stoop to in attempts to embed their delusions into legitimate curricula should be met harshly with required irrefutable physical evidence. Extraordinary demands require extraordinary proofs!

I knew the climate worriers had gone bananas about fifteen years ago when a Minnesota politician went on the Weather Channel and fretted that spring might some dreaded day arrive too soon. Really awful things might happen, like daffodils coming up a few days sooner.

He was daft! Apparently he never noticed that people have been decamping from Minnesota to Southern California for 140 years so they don’t have to shovel snow, chip ice off doorsteps, and keep several overcoats at the ready.

“The only field of medicine that should include CC would be that of Psychiatry ?”

I think so.

Psychiatry would be the only area where “Climate Change” would directly affect the medical profession and cause them to add extra resources to deal with the phenomenon of mass delusion where many people are in great fear of human-caused climate change, even though it has never been shown to exist.

The physicians who believe in human-caused climate change should treat their own climate change delusions and heal themselves of this psychosis before attempting to treat the general public. Otherwise, it will be like the blind leading the blind: Both will fall in the Climate Change ditch.

Our newly minted MD granddaughter went into “Family Practice,” her Texas medical school keeping up with the needs. She went to a cold climate. Acceptance of some biologists I know that it can only get warmer (so we can ignore the cold studies) demands re-education.

Global warming is a new religion. It seems to be an intolerant faith based belief system with fanatical followers, sin and repentance rituals and even child saints.

Of course global warming has nothing to do with medical training. And taking time out of what is already a difficult and crowded curriculum to teach global warming would be an absurdity. But forcing aspiring doctors to take classes in global warming would be a test of true belief – a screening process – for new doctors.

Like a religion global warming is supposed to be at the center of everyone’s life, and at the center of all education and learning. I’m not knocking religion. And I don’t care what you choose to believe so long as you don’t hurt anyone else and so long as you don’t use force or the coercion of government to promote your beliefs. The last few time religious fanatics tried to force their religion and religious tests onto others it didn’t turn out to well. In order to get through medical school I don’t think doctors should be forced to swear fealty to this new religion.

My doctor was at a medical conference in the US and he asked colleagues if they had noticed a rise in athsma patients over the past few years. Canadian doctors seem to get loaded with climate bull from the Ministry of Health. He was told that, no, they hadn’t noticed this at all. So where are all the climate change victims.

I have no problems with training medical doctors or anyone else about climate science. What I have a problem with is teaching anyone the IPCC’s version of pseudo climate science that’s so wrong, it’s an embarrassment to all legitimate science, that is, science resulting from the scientific method.

To be sure, the IPCC must try very hard to be wrong, for the scientific truth is a serious threat to their existence, agenda and ideology. It’s unfortunate that partisan lefties are too far off the rails to open their minds to learn this truth and the controversy will persist until they do. Given the current state of political discourse, this won’t happen until something like the GND has already destroyed Western wealth and prosperity, at which time, it will be too late.

The best way to change hearts and minds is a very public, full court press demanding that alarmist scientists defend their position with actual science and then embarrass the hell out of them as it becomes clear that they can’t. There’s bit of a catch22 here, since the reason they won’t defend their position with real science is because to fail would be a political disaster and if they have the slightest grasp of the actual physics, they know that they can’t succeed.

CO2isnotevil
Your comments related to science are always very good, so I hate to criticize anything you’ve written … but … I’ll get over that !

This time YOU ARE SO WRONG about one thought in your comment, that you will have to be locked up, and reprogrammed.

YOU WROTE:
“The best way to change hearts and minds is a very public, full court press demanding that alarmist scientists defend their position with actual science and then embarrass the hell out of them as it becomes clear that they can’t.”

MY RESPONSE:
If the world was filled with logical people, with scientific knowledge, like you, that would make sense.

But “climate change” is a secular religion, not real science, based on wild guess, always wrong, predictions of a coming climate crisis … that started in the late 1950s !

The alarmists completely ignore the past 325 years of mild, harmless, pleasant, intermittent global warming, since the cold 1690s — probably about +2 degrees C. of global warming since then.

Data, facts and logic will NOT change minds of Climate Alarmists
… because data, facts and logic never created their radical climate change beliefs in the first place !

Replace ‘alarmist scientists’ with ‘Democrat politicians’ and ‘actual science’ with ‘actual crimes’ and it seems to be working for impeachment …

I agree that climate alarmism is a secular religion and that most people are ill equipped to follow the scientific arguments, which is why I propose fighting fire with fire and wrap the real science with emotional triggers designed to counteract the fear driving alarmism. My expectation is not that most viewers would grasp the science, but that they would pick up on the emotional wreckage as their heroes crumble from being boxed into logical corners that they can not escape, which should be evident whether or not the viewers followed the logic that broke their hero. Non sequitur rambling, blank stares and nervousness in response to questions they have no answer for will go a long way towards revealing the truth, especially if a series of relevant clips were to appear in the media and the target is a known ‘expert’.

The person I would most like to see confronted by an informed skeptical scientist is Gavin Schmidt. Unfortunately, he’s afraid to debate, as well he should be if his desire is to preserve the status quo. Schmidt reports to the NASA administrators office which reports to Trump, so compelling him to support the science he claims supports trillions of dollars for what’s otherwise nothing but waste fraud and abuse would be relatively easy for Trump to do and clearly in the nations best interest. However; I suspect that if Schmidt was compelled to justify the IPCC’s fake science on the record to any informed scientist, even me, he would sooner quit then risk being so thoroughly embarrassed by the truth.

More days with extreme heat could account for an increase of 1 million deaths each year in India alone

I have never studied medicine, but I was of the impression that medical students have learned about heat strokes before, even the last couple of centuries.

Next students of electronic engineering also need training indoctrination in the climate change control, in order to make Green electric power generation work and remove inconvenient physical limitations.

This is just a natural extension to the climate change curriculum currently available in kindergarten.

Medical professionals, and especially instructors, don’t have the time to devote to it. However, they are taught to take research published in journals as gospel-at least until the next study supersedes the last one.

My extensive experience with physicians (and surgeons) in medical schools is that they are very bright and have been congratulated on their cleverness their entire life. The extent of their self-belief is hard to comprehend for anyone who has not encountered it. I have had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing at some of the shite I’ve heard tumbling out of surgeons’ mouths when they’ve confidently asserted views far outside their area of expertise.

Global warming could fry us all(**) but knowing why we are frying has jack-$h!t to do with how to treat the burns.

“My approach is all they need to do is add a climate lens to what they’re already teaching,” she said.

This comment made me smile. There is a certain delightful naivete in Dr. Renee Salas’s magical thinking that Medical School curriculums can or should be altered just by a little dab of this and a little dab of that and then everything will be honkey-dory. Medial science is evolving rapidly and curriculum alterations are needed just to be able to provide guidance on core issues that may be relevant sometimes in the future. There are sociological agendas, always public and needing to be scrutinized and assessed to determine if some of these agenda items need to be incorporated. Then there are the performance aspects of medical training and the assessment criteria on which the student is to go onto the next phase. There is the student’s awareness that they are not really prepared to make important life altering diagnosis and treatments for others has its own emotional component. Integrating important issues, some of which may be requested by students may be worth while although these fall into broader categories of concern for broad categories of medical needs and providing for those needs within a larger socio-economic setting. “A little dab will do ya” is not applicable to medical education curriculum changes.

The smarter doctors know from studying epidemiology that establishing a cause-and-effect relationship between two variables in complex systems is pretty difficult. https://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/83/10/792.pdf
So they will know that the null hypothesis in climate change (volatility in climate parameters is due to natural causes) has not been disproven by the theory that tiny changes in trace gases are important.
In medicine as in other data-based professions, the climate change believers are in the not-very-bright category. The smart ones are ignoring the issue and getting on with more important matters.

Patient Earth is a mystery case for medical professionals. Practically no symptoms. Maybe little fever: +0,8 C in 140 years. Very small sea level rise. No more storms, floods or droughts or bush fires than usually. Nothing life threatening.

Laboratory tells that CO2 levels have risen in the last 40 years but they are just above dangerously low level of 180 ppm. Water levels in air, clouds and ice sheets are within normal variations.

Cure: 3 trillion dollar likely ineffective CO2 reduction program that has not even been tested. It has UN pledge level approval and only the rich countries need to pay.

Since I’m not certain what my symptoms would be if I am suffering from an un-diagnosed case of ‘global warming’, maybe I should go to the emergency room and request an exam and a prescription for medical weed. I’ll tell them I read on the internet that they are not trained properly per Dr. Renee Salas, an emergency room doctor and climate change researcher at the Harvard Global Health Institute. I just hope they don’t over prescribe my dosage and make fat and sleepy!

Salas said the survey shows there is an opportunity to train the next generation of physicians so they have the skills necessary to practice in a future where global warming affects every aspect of their jobs. – article

Okay, but what EVER will she do if it gets cooler, instead?

There’s a danger not mentioned in this article, and that is the appearance of eastern equine encephalitis on this continent. Venezuelan equine encephalitis (VEE) was not transmissible to humans, but could easily move from one horse to another by mosquitoes carrying that bug, which could kill a horse by dehydration alone within 24 hours of contracting it. EEE is transmissible to humans, and has no cure. So far, it is rare, but it does come from the tropics. If we come into a cooling climate and long spells of colder weather, this may impair the spread of it, but this, along with zika fever and a few other nasty tropical bugs, like the warm weather that helps them spread. So is this doctor – this Emergency Room doctor???? — aware that tropical diseases like EEE are rare but can still be found and humans can catch them?

I’d frankly prefer more cold weather if it means the bugs that carry these nasty critters aren’t available.

The fact of evolution is pretty useful in many little ways, starting from understanding genetics, nutrition, human behaviour, limits of human performance, to name a few. I see no good sides in a creationist doctor.

Thanks for publishing this, I will avoid any doctor mentioned or any doctor trained at one of the 15% of medical colleges with a global warming curriculum. I wonder at what global temp all this special training will kick in with benefits. Where I live (PI) the temp is seldom below 75F at night and most days in upper 80s/low90s. Local docs seem to deal with it without special training and natives are multiplying like rabbits. Life is good where it is warm.

As a doctor, I studied the climate consensus science closely. My teachers had taught me to be skeptical of science consensus, because in medicine the consensus is so often wrong. I had grown up during the global cooling scam. As a doctor, I was able to analyse the original papers, not that easy as it was outside my fields. I had to study Ehrlich in post grad, and even then his predictions had failed.
So I am now a confirmed sceptic. WUTU and Climate Audit helped enormously, thankyou.
Not all doctors follow the Climate Change religion. I will also avoid any doctor who does.

As another one, I would remind all that dealing in global average temperature conveniently distracts everyone enough to overlook the fact that self-regulating tropical regions of the globe changed but little while subarctic regions incurred the bulk of both 20th century warmings, and as largely beneficial modest elevations of their nightly lows somewhat elevating those daily averages.

All this hysteria over myriads of overheated humans is misplaced, having long historically recurred periodically as short term weather variation. Neither unprecedented nor permanent. Send in the next patient, please.

So without climate change training how will our young physicians distinguish regular heatstroke from climate change heatstroke? How will they know how to treat climate change frostbite when they only know regular frostbite? And how will they distinguish climate change malaria from regular malaria?

It is a scam and it is shameful. The goal is to “litmus test” med school candidates. Let’s keep the “wrong sorts of people” out of medicine.

Applicants to teach at UC Berkeley and other colleges around the US are now having their views on “diversity and inclusiveness” scored by a rubric (online link below) to evaluate their moral fitness. (WSJ Opinion, Dec. 19)

In the past few years “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” statements, in which applicants for faculty positions profess their commitment to these social goals, have become required on eight UC campuses and at colleges across the country. These requirements are promoted as fulfilling worthy goals: to help redress the historic exclusion of underrepresented groups, to ensure that candidates from all backgrounds apply for and are given fair consideration for faculty jobs, and to make sure faculty respect and support all students in their teaching and mentoring.

It isn’t just universities. Want to be an educator? Better read up on “what you need to know”

Rubric to Assess Candidate Contributions to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

A new survey has found that few medical schools incorporate climate change into their curricula.

That’s an outrage. It should have been *no* medical schools incorporating climate change into their curricula.

Regardless of how real or fake you think man-caused climate change is. Treatment for medical conditions are based on the medical conditions themselves not on whether or not the medical conditions are indirectly caused by one thing or another. A patient comes in with severe burns (for example) it doesn’t matter if the “wildfire” that burned them was “caused” by climate change or not, you treat the burns the same regardless.

Well: I relocated from Glasgow UK, to Oxford UK in 1993, 7 years after relocating from Cambridge UK to Glasgow.

There is a temperature difference between Glasgow and Oxbridge of around 1C give or take.

Now I shifted climate of 1C in 1 day, not forty years.

Did I die?

NO.

Did I suffer illness? No.

Did I adjust seamlessly?

Yes.

There is no risk to human health through a 1C change in climate.

Just like birds which migrate from Africa to the north of Scotland somehow manage to cope with rather different temperatures too.

Our bodies can adapt to changes of up to 50C a year, certainly 35C most years in the UK. We do not die as a result.

Better societal adaptation is to say: ‘go on holiday in Cornwall, not the Med: then you might not get malignant melanoma!’ That is nothing to do with climate change, more to do with idiotic tourists not taking basic precautions to protect sensitive skin from intense sunlight.

A bit like if you go skiing in |Zermatt in January, best to buy some long johns, thermal shirts and decent ski pants.

Doctors presumably study tropical diseases because they may treat patients returning from the tropics. If the world gets warmer they may see the same diseases occurring closer to home. The diseases will be the same, just the distribution may change. In the UK there are reports of more ticks carrying dog diseases not native to the UK but how much of this is due to warming and how much to the increased numbers of travelling pets I do not know.

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